


Cause and Effect

by cosmickirk



Category: Downton Abbey
Genre: F/M, Grief/Mourning, Widowed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-15
Updated: 2014-06-15
Packaged: 2018-01-26 10:21:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,240
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1684862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmickirk/pseuds/cosmickirk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mary finds that widowhood is not the world of veils and shadows she once thought it would be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cause and Effect

People always make grief out to be a very messy business. They compare it to shadows, veils, describe it as a time of murkiness and lack of clarity when clarity is most needed. It’s supposed to be directionless, you’re supposed to feel lost.

Grief is not so for Mary Crawley.

The several months following her husband’s death are a time of blinding sharpness and hyper-awareness. It surprised her, but perhaps it shouldn’t have done. It was a time of simple, harsh realities; _Matthew is dead. The cause of death was a car crash. The car overturned and crushed him ruthlessly. George will never have a father. My husband is dead, and my heart was buried with his mangled corpse._ Some of the truths are quite poetic; _I was only half myself without him, now I will be only half myself for all eternity._ Other truths are of a cold, monetary nature; _the damages to the car will cost us a fortune, if it is salvageable at all. What a pity._

It is a time of stark contrast. Her pale, blanch skin against the shades of her mourning clothes. _Oh Matthew, you always make everything so black and white_.

Would he be proud?

Mourning is unfortunately factual. A time of cause and effect. _Cause: Matthew is dead. Effect: the estate is in danger yet again. Effect: I am no longer to be countess of Grantham, and the estate will be passed on to my son. Effect: I will never again fall asleep to the rhythm of his heart. Effect: I cannot look at my son without grief choking me like a noose. Effect: I will one day have to explain to George all the nuances that made Matthew who he was. I will have to create a man out of words and fragments of memories. What a task. Effect: Papa might revert back to his old ways, and god knows where that got us last time. Effect: Matthew’s responsibilities will fall upon my shoulders. How selfish of him. Effect: Isobel has lost the greatest thing one can lose. Effect: My heart will forever be in disrepair._

 _These are the facts_ , Mary thinks. _And they are undeniable._ They don’t madden her, as one might expect. They don’t make her shake her fists at the sky and scream at a faceless god. Her ordeal was not a plan of the divine. It was the result of bad timing and over-zealous driving, and that was that.

The months should not have been straightforward, but so they were, and Mary moved through them clinically, methodically, coolly detached from the world around her. If nothing else, she learned that the initial shock of a husband’s death can quickly settle into something comparable to the ebb and flow of the sea. Her grief for her late husband, Mary thought, was just like steady waves, constantly lapping onto the shore of her mind. Gentle and relentless; always there, however unobtrusive. And in the typical fashion of the sea, high tide comes, which means memories of her husband come in kind. They crash down on her shore with greater force, and on those days she takes her breakfast in bed, rests for longer than usual, becomes late for dinner, longs for the comfort of her mourning clothes. But then high tide fades into low, and the beach becomes safe for her again. She decides on clothes with colour.

Just like the pull of the tide, facts are irrefutable. Nobody could stare point-blank at the great swells of the oceans and declare them nonexistent, so why should Mary deny her husband’s death and try to reverse what had already happened? That was her opinion.

That isn’t to say Mary was unfeeling, or that she had received the news of Matthew’s death with a straight face and a quiet, “Oh, how dreadful”. No, in fact, it was quite the reverse. Mary was guilty of more than one instance of breaking down into sobs at reminders of her husband and furious outbursts during dinner. She was not immune to reacting fiercely, viciously, to seemingly well-intended remarks, and the weeks following the tragedy she had spent weeping so much she feared she would drown. Mary sometimes caught herself thinking that maybe that would be for the best. But as has already been said, high tide is only a temporary state.

Even what had transpired, which to some was too devastating to even consider, was in Mary’s mind a simple chain that went something like this; death (trigger), watching the green AC be towed into the driveway (final evidence), transitioning into black clothes (final acceptance), funeral (required), eulogy (customary), burial (what else was there to do?), the setting of the gravestone (tedious formality), and, finally, absolutely endless condolences (understandable, but wearisome). It was all evaluated and neatly categorized in her mind, labelled under the most dispassionate words in her lexicon.

The simplicity of the situation augmented the trouble, quite unfairly. Because sometimes she wished that she could coax a scream to rip through her chest and drown out everything else. She wished some part of her death duties were daunting or tortuous, or, at the very least, offending to her feminine nerves. She looked for anything that could numb her, but everything was crystal clear, and her situation so terribly and brutally simple.

Her best bet at a little relief was guilt. She sought it out in the early morning hours, when pale calm light reveals everything. She woke up at dawn, and the quiet was deafening. She sat and seriously considered herself. _I really am damaged goods now._  The corner of her mouth turned up in a smirk at the thought.

 _I loved him_ , she would say to herself, staring at her interlaced fingers. _I loved Matthew desperately. So how can I have such little trouble handling grief?_ These reflections at morning affirmed in Mary’s mind that she was a selfish, selfish woman, and in her opinion, her clarity of thought was surely a sign that she had never really loved her husband. The notion made her sick to her stomach.  _Am I capable of loving?_ She wondered, with a sense of self loathing that reminded her of Matthew at the time when they all thought he would never walk again. She did not have an answer to the questions she posed herself, so she was content with the idea that something was terribly wrong with her. Mary's thoughts would finally leave the subject of Matthew, and the ensuing guilt was a welcome distraction from the monotonous dejection of mourning her darling husband.

In the end, calculation and practicality was Mary's ticket. She completed all the tasks she was set in relation to her husband’s death with a sense of duty and a desolation she was well acquainted with. It was _overly_ simple, and that was the trouble; nothing was so overwhelming that it became a cause for diversion. The result? A mind that understood everything with painful coherence and an exposed heart with nothing to protect it from her constant, acute misery. Seeing everything in shades of black and grey. Embracing sadness as you would an old friend. Sitting at your bedroom window, staring but not seeing. Smiling at dinner because your muscles still remember how to, and so little is as it used to be that you cling to anything that resembles your life before tragedy.

That was the damned result.


End file.
